


the waiting that happens between one note and the next

by ceserabeau



Series: Avengers AU [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Marvel Avengers Fusion, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, F/M, Gen, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-29
Updated: 2014-08-03
Packaged: 2018-01-21 07:13:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1542170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceserabeau/pseuds/ceserabeau
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Your name is Stanislaw,” they say.<br/>It sounds right. He rolls the syllables around his mouth; they seem to fit and when he says it aloud everything clicks into place. He is Stanislaw, he is as cold as a Russian winter and just as deadly, he is a soldier – their soldier, the Winter Soldier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Richard Siken's [The Dislocated Room](http://theysaid.livejournal.com/1617868.html), literally can't get enough of his writing.

Stiles slips. Stiles falls.

-

“What is your name?” they ask.

He opens his mouth to answer but stops short. There’s a name on the tip of his tongue, but he can’t quite remember it. It’s just out of his reach so he closes his mouth, tries to figure out what he’s missing.

“Your name is Stanislaw,” they say.

It sounds right. He rolls the syllables around his mouth; they seem to fit and when he says it aloud everything clicks into place. He is Stanislaw, he is as cold as a Russian winter and just as deadly, he is a soldier – their soldier, the Winter Soldier.

“Yes,” he says and they all smile.

-

He wakes up and goes to Romania. He wakes up and goes to Japan. He wakes up and goes to Brazil.

-

There’s a dream he has sometimes, when they let him out the ice for more than a few weeks. In it, he’s knee deep in mud and his boots stick whenever he tries to move. He’s surrounded by men in uniform; some are trying to cleaning their weapons, some are trying to sleep, some are trying not to cry.

“There’s something moving out there,” the man next to him murmurs, peering around the tree he’s standing behind.

“ _Don’t_ ,” Stas cries, but it’s too late. There’s the crack of a gun going off and the man’s toppling backwards, a bloody hole where his eye used to be.

Something splatters his uniform, his face. When he looks down he’s covered in blood and it’s as red as the star he wears on his shoulder. There’s copper in his mouth and it tastes like fear and death and surrender.

-

There’s a girl. Her name is Lidochka; or at least, that’s what they’ve named her. The trainers tell him that she is the next Black Widow, the legend reincarnated. To him, she seems too small, fragile, until she makes five perfect kill shots blindfolded.

She’s a fast learner, his little Lidochka. It’s not hard to see why they’ve chosen her, the girl they’ve shaped in their perfect weapon. He hones her craft for them, teaches her how to be a better weapon, how to be a better killer.

She asks him to teach her more: she leans up to press her lips to his, and he pushes her back. She wants him – she might be a liar, but she’s not as subtle as she thinks she is – but he’ll leave it to their trainers to teach her the art of seduction.

He does tease her though, gives her nicknames. _Solnyshko_ is the one that irritates her the least so he sticks with it, whispers it in her ear when he pins her down on the mats, into her hair when he wraps his arms around her to correct her stance.

It isn’t until their final day together that he gives in, tangles a hand in her long red hair, tilts her head up to his and presses his lips to hers. It’s electric and satisfying, too long denying the attraction that’s been building between them. There’s a moan rumbling through her chest when their trainers finally pull them apart.

“I’ll see you soon,” he promises and disappears from view.

-

He wakes up and goes to Canada. He wakes up and goes to Belgium. He wakes up and goes to China.

-

There’s a dream he has sometimes, when they let him out the ice for more than a few weeks. In it, he’s sitting on a couch with a glass of water, watching a skinny kid sitting by the window. The room is lit with a faint orange glow from the late afternoon sun and the radio is playing something in French, an upbeat tune that he wants to get up and dance to. The kid’s hand moves slowly, steadily, sketching something that he can see through the dingy glass.

“What are you drawing?” Stas asks.

The kid glances over. He has big brown eyes and curly hair, a crooked jaw and a nose that looks like it’s been broken maybe more than once. He smiles and his face is silhouetted against the light of the setting sun.

“Just stuff,” the kid tells him.

“Let me see,” Stas says.

When he stands, his knees creak and the kid laughs at him, calls him an old man. It makes Stas’ lips twitch because it’s an old joke, but he isn’t sure from when or where. He walks to the kid, places a gentle hand on his shoulder so he can lean down to look at the picture. The kid tilts the sketchpad so he can see it better.

It’s a playground, with a slide and a seesaw and a jungle gym, a sandpit somewhere at the back. There are children clambering all over it and parents around the edges: mothers with pushchairs, fathers holdings ice creams. It looks familiar, makes something like longing twist in his gut, even though he’s never been to a playground.

“You like it?” the kid asks; “It kinda looks like home, don’t you think?”

Stas stares at it and thinks _yes_ , but he doesn’t know where home is, his or the kid’s. “Looks good,” he says instead.

The kid smiles up at him, his teeth straight and white and even, and turns away. Stas goes back to the couch and zones out to the ticking of the clock and the scratching of pen against paper.

It isn’t until he wakes up that he realises they were speaking English.

-

In the chamber there is more than just ice. There are needles under his skin, in his brain. He knows because he sees them lined up before they slam the lid down, but when they let him out again there is nothing but the faint memory of pain dancing along his nerves.

Sometimes Stas opens his eyes and finds there are new memories. New tastes on his tongue, new feelings under his fingertips. His body moves in ways that he’s never practised and he knows things he’s never learnt.

He follows the orders they give him like the good soldier he is and never questions them. It’s easy: find the target, raise the gun, shoot and leave. Until the day he’s in a clearing in the Black Forest, stalking the defector who thinks he’s going to get away with switching sides.

The trees tower over him like giants, a light mist rising from the forest floor to shroud them in a white haze. It makes it harder to see where the man is running, and the cold makes his arm ache where metal joins flesh.

It’s easy to get turned around in a forest like this. He thinks he’s been in one before, this one, except back then it was 1943 and there were explosions and people shouting and bodies lying all over the ground. He stumbles, turning left and right to look for someone: Peterson, or maybe Morita; and there’s snow falling and his helmet’s falling in his eyes and where the hell is E Company? There’s no backup and he can’t see, can’t shoot and –

Something cold and smooth presses into his skin and he snaps back to a forest on a chilly autumn evening. There’s a gun against his neck and what feels like a hole in his brain already.

“Not as good as the legend says,” the man says, breath tickling his hair. “I thought the Winter Soldier was better than this.”

Oh, but he is; he pulls his knife as he turns and sinks it into the man’s gut, slits him from stomach to neck. It’s messy, emotional, not protocol, but Stas is fairly sure he’s about to have a breakdown so he just drags the body back to the waiting car.

When he gets into the car, his handler turns a blank look on him. She doesn’t ask what happened, just waits.

Stas shrugs at her. “He got the drop on me,” he says.

“Explain,” she demands.

“I had a flashback,” he says, and thinks of the feel of a M1903 Springfield in his hands and an explosion kicking dirt up into his face, “To the last time I was here.”

His handler doesn’t frown, but it’s a close thing. “You’ve never been here before,” she tells him, and when she turns away unease settles in his belly.

It’s no surprise really when they put him on ice for a long time.

-

He wakes up and goes to India. He wakes up and goes to England. He wakes up and goes to Australia.

-

There’s a dream he has sometimes, when they let him out the ice for more than few weeks. In it, he’s curled up in a hole in the ground, wrapped in blankets and burlap. It’s icy cold, a light snow falling, and he can’t feel his feet even through three pairs of socks. When he breathes out it turns to white mist in the air, hanging around his head like a cloud.

“Stop breathing,” the guy next to him says; “They’ll see where we are.”

“Won’t be any patrols out now,” Stas tells him. “Too damn cold, even for the Krauts.”

The guy rolls his eyes. “You keep saying that, but wait until you get up to take a leak. They’ve probably got you in their sights right now.”

Stas wants to tell him that they’re too far back for any sniper to reach, but what he says instead is, “You’d miss me,” and flicks a rock at the guy’s head.

The guy laughs and nudges him and he pushes back; it goes back and forth for a minute until a voice pipes up from a few feet away: “Will you two idiots cut it out?”

“Sorry, Cap,” the guy calls back, but he winks at Stas like he’s in on some kind of joke.

They fall silent after that and Stas hunkers down between the wall and the guy’s body. His teeth are chattering and all he can smell are the beans the people in the next foxhole are eating. In the end, he just closes his eyes and tries to remember a time when he didn’t hate the cold.

-

He wakes up and goes to France. Under the Eiffel Tower he kisses Lidochka for the first time, makes love to her in a studio apartment on the fifth floor. She is older now, twenty-two she says, but she still looks the same, youthful and beautiful.

“You look the same too,” she says, and he knows from the face that looks back from the mirror that she’s telling the truth.

They fall in love a little in that apartment in Paris. In between tracking their target and scoping out the location, they kiss and hold hands and go out to dinner. She whispers sweet nothings in his ear, and he calls her Solnyshko like he used to. It makes his heart swell in his chest, something he’s never felt before coursing through his veins when he tucks a long strand of fiery hair behind her ear.

He wants to blame it for why he doesn’t pull the trigger, but it’s more than that. Lying on his front with an eye pressed to the scope, belly cold from the roof, brings something back to him: another wood, his stomach pressed against a mossy rock, rifle in hand. A voice says shoot, kill, now, but he’s got his Captain in his sights not the enemy so he waits and waits and –

Lidochka unloads two into the Captain’s head and when he hits the ground it’s not the Captain, it’s their target.

“It was a mistake,” he tells her later, thinking of the icy chill he can never escape. “Don’t report it.”

She shakes her head at him, swiping the cloth down the counter in the kitchen to get rid of their prints. “I already have,” she says.

His stomach drops, fear and adrenaline spiking suddenly. His first reaction is to flee, heading straight for the door, but Lidochka puts her shoulder into his stomach and tackles him to the floor. It’s bloody and brutal; he doesn’t want to hurt her, just wants to get out, but she’s as ruthless as ever, so beautifully efficient it’s hard to not admire her skill.

She puts a jolt of electricity into the place where scar tissue meets cold metal and the pain sends him tumbling into oblivion.

-

“Welcome back,” they say, “You slept a long time.”

-

There’s a dream he has sometimes, when they let him out the ice for more than a few weeks. In it, he’s standing in a long corridor, dark and gloomy, and there’s a boy being beaten up at the end of it. The other kids are kicking at him and calling him names, and Stas feels a sudden jolt of sympathy for the poor boy.

“Hey,” he shouts, even though he wants to run because ten to one are never good odds even for someone like him, “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?”

The ringleader turns and gives him a stink eye. “Get the hell outta here,” he snarls.

Stas charges at them instead. The kids don’t look too impressed, but he has a reputation for fighting hard and dirty so when he starts throwing punches they get with the programme and scatter.

When they’ve all disappeared, Stas looks down and sees that the boy has managed to prop himself up against the wall. He’s breathing heavily and his hair is in complete disarray, but he’s not keeping quiet, not showing any fear or pain.

Stas watches him for a moment before he leans over with hand outstretched. “Need some help?” he asks.

The boy looks up. “That depends if you’re going to hit me too,” he says, tilting his head to look at him.

Stas raises an eyebrow. “I’m not in the habit of kicking people when they’re down,” he tells the boy who laughs, loud in the still silence of the corridor. He has a bloody nose, but his teeth are blinding white when he smiles.

“I’m Scott,” the boy says, and reaches up to grasp Stas’ hand. “What’s your name?”

-

“Kill Captain America,” they say and the Winter Soldier obeys without question.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Procrastination nation over here, exams drive me to ~~drink~~ write.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I couldn’t be bothered to stick to either Cap 2 or the traditional comic storyline. Much easier to just make it all up myself.

He and Captain America meet in the middle of downtown DC. It’s a bright fall day but there’s a chill in the air, and Stas is reminded of his icy bed. The memory of the cold pushes him forward as he attacks.

It’s not an easy fight, but then he never expected it to be. His handlers were telling the truth: the Captain has the speed of a dozen men, the strength of a dozen more. The man is highly trained and extremely dangerous, but this is the Winter Soldier’s he’s fighting and Stas has never known any different.

They’re in the middle of the street, surrounded by glass and metal and screaming pedestrians, when the Captain puts a hand under his jaw and flips him over. His mask comes off, skidding across the tarmac before it comes to a halt against the wheel of a car. Stas doesn’t bother moving for it, a waste of time and energy, just pulls his gun and starts to turn.

It isn’t until he’s face to face with his opponent that he realises the Captain isn’t attacking him any longer.

“Stiles?” Captain America asks.

Stas cocks his head. “What the hell is a Stiles?”

The Captain’s mouth opens and closes a few times, like he’s trying to say something but finding no words. Stas isn’t particularly interested in anything he has to say. While the Captain’s floundering, he takes the opportunity to raise his gun and pull the trigger.

The shot hits the man’s leg, and he drops like a stone. Bullets beat bones after all, even Captain America’s.

It takes ten steps to get to the Captain’s prone body. His leg is bleeding heavily, but a man like Captain America should still be able to walk. Stas is slightly disappointed that he’s not even trying to get away.

He reaches down to wrap his metal hand around the Captain’s throat. The man barely puts up a fight, just bats weakly at Stas’ arm like that’ll make him stop. Stas bats them away, sets his shoulder and lifts, and the Captain comes right up off the floor.

“Please,” he says hoarsely, “Please, Stiles, _stop_! You know me.”

He’s begging; how pathetic. “I don’t know you,” Stas says and squeezes tighter.

The Captain’s face turns bright red; full onset hypoxic state if Stas remembers his biology right. Most people take between seven and fourteen seconds to reach unconsciousness, but he’s adjusted his calculations for a man like this. He starts counting then: twenty, nineteen, eighteen, seventeen –

“You’ve known me your whole life,” the Captain croaks out. “Your name is Przemyslaw Stilinski – Stiles –”

The name sounds familiar to his ears and it shakes something loose deep in him. A memory: a warm summer evening and someone nudging him in the dark, a voice whispering _Stiles, Stiles, get over here_.

Stas pushes it away, says, “Shut up,” and picks up his counting again: sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen –

“No,” the Captain says, voice whisper-soft and face a beetroot colour as Stas chokes the life out of him, “Stiles, please.”

God, that name. “Shut up,” Stas shouts, much harsher than he intended, and he slams the Captain down onto the rough surface of the tarmac with a resounding crack.

The Captain writhes in pain beneath his hands; broken back, somewhere around the L2 if he’s not mistaken. He doesn’t fight any more, just lies still under his killer’s hands and waits, watching Stas watch him.

“Finish it then,” the Captain says and his voice is still steady with a hand around his throat, “’Cause I’m with you ‘til the end the line.”

Something inside him cracks, breaks, and Stas hesitates for a moment, not pushing down like he knows he should. He stares into the Captain’s eyes and sees the recognition there, the panic and confusion and love in his gaze. It makes him rear back, and that’s when someone sprays a line of bullets across his back.

He rolls out of the way, ducking behind a car. There’s a bullet in his shoulder; he can feel it sparking deep in the metal. There’s blood on his uniform, trickling down his sleeve, and his hands are shaking. Across the lanes, Captain America rolls to his feet, head twisting this way and that, searching.

When he turns away, Stas runs.

-

“You failed your mission,” they say.

There are normally repercussions for failure, things like electricity and hunger and cold. This time though, they just shove him into a chair and strap him down, make him live every moment of the needles going through his flesh.

He passes out screaming and when he wakes up again, feels no different. A sloppy job then, but whatever the charts say must match what they expect after a session. They pat him on the shoulder and send him out again, put him on a helicopter to New York and let him go.

At ten thousand feet he zones out to the endless droning of the engines; and that’s when it happens. It starts coming back to him, glimpses of times and places he doesn’t remember being. His first instinct is that it’s more implanted memories, the Red Room fiddling around in his brain again, but these ones are different, more tangible, more _real_.

Kids in an orphanage curled together under blankets late at night. Last apartment on the right on the third floor. A boy in an alley in Brooklyn with a black eye and a bloody nose. Straps on a cold, metal table holding him down while someone shines a bright light in his eyes. A man without a face. Commandos trekking across Europe, guns at the ready. A long, long fall.

He jerks when a hand lands on his shoulder. “Everything okay?” the man next to him asks neutrally.

Stas looks up: he’s wedged himself up against the chopper door, arms wrapped around himself. A defensive position, submissive and weak. He forces himself to straighten, to push back the memories.

“Fine,” he says, but really it feels like he’s going out of his mind.

-

He and Captain America meet again in Manhattan, where the Brooklyn Bridge slopes down into the city. There’s a man made of metal and a flash of red hair dancing around him, but he focuses on the Captain, his target.

“I’m not going to fight you,” the Captain says, dodging Stas’ blows. “You’re my friend.”

Stas finds himself sneering, rage pooling under his skin like poison. Who is this man who can claim such a thing, being the Winter Soldier’s friend?

But he knows who, has always known: the lonely boy with only a teddy bear for company, the skinny kid with shaggy hair and oversized hand-me-downs, the man with purpose and pride and endless faith.

“You’re my mission,” Stas shouts back, hoping that saying it aloud will somehow make it true.

The Captain only shakes his head, something that might be pity glinting in his eyes. He must know how off his game Stas is and yet he makes no move to attack, just holds his hands up placatingly.

The rage boils over; Stas snarls and throws himself forward. But something’s wrong. His aim is off and he’s pulling his punches. Whenever he raises his gun or throws his knife, fragments of memory cloud his vision. It makes it impossible to deliver a fatal blow.

The Captain dodges all his attacks, ducks under the punches, avoids the shots. Stas has no words, only a frustration that burns in his stomach, and it makes him weak. Makes him sloppy. One well-placed kick is all it takes for Stas to go tumbling over the railings and down, down, down to the street below.

He lies there, gasping on the concrete, trying to figure out which way is up. Above him Iron Man swoops in lazy circles as the Captain starts to climb down to him, but Stas loses sight of them, stuck in the last time he fell: the rattling of wheels inches from his face, the creaking and groaning of metal giving way, the rush of wind in his ears and flurries of snow tickling his face as he tumbles down into nothingness.

A shape looms through the fog surrounding his brain and Captain America crouches next to him. “It’s gonna be okay,” he whispers and places something against Stas’ arm.

The sharp prick of a needle is so familiar by now, but never has it been slid into him by such gentle hands.

-

He wakes.

Everything is eerily quiet. The room around him is brightly lit, and when he inhales his nose stings with the sharp scent of antiseptic that he equates with hospitals and injuries. Everything hurts, a dull ache like he’s been through the wringer a few times.

He tries to sit up, but there are straps holding him down. He struggles against them from a moment, and when nobody objects to his wriggling he realises he’s alone. It’s not hard to twist his wrist to get at the buckle; he’s not sure where he learnt that trick, but he’s good at it.

When the straps fall away Stas sits up. The room is exactly what he thought: white, clean, stark. Tables with surgical instruments laid out on them. Machines all around, hooked up to him and the wall and each other. Clock high above him, red numbers lazily clicking over. No windows, a single door: one way in and one way out.

He swings his legs over the side of the bed and tries to stand but his legs are too shaky. He reaches out to steady himself against the bed and jerks back at the sight of his hand. Gleaming metal overlapping in small slats; he follows them up from fingertip to wrist to elbow to the curve of his shoulder under the hospital gown.

It’s hardly something new. He’s had it for so long now it’s a part of him – but something in him still recoils at the sight of it anyway, like he’s never seen it before.

He supposes he hasn’t. Or at least the part of him that is Stiles Stilinski hasn’t. For Stas though it’s normal: he remembers having no arm, then a shitty prosthetic he could barely move, then a metal limb that felt as real as flesh and bones.

Stas pushes past the weirdness, focuses on getting upright. It takes him one minute to stand on his own. Two minutes to walk without feeling like he’s going to fall over. Three to make it to the door. The keypad isn’t complicated, not for him, and he takes a steadying breath before letting it slide open.

When it does there’s a row of people on the other side. He tilts his head, confused, surprised, at a familiar face staring back at him.

“Scott,” he says, reaching out, but then there’s a sharp pain in his neck and everything goes black.

-

He wakes again.

This time he’s in an interrogation room. Everything is dark and dingy, lit by a single light bulb. The walls are bare, plaster over concrete; it must be a basement because again there are no windows, a single door: one way in and one way out. His arm is still there so they haven’t figured out how to take it off yet. His hands and ankles are bound to the chair he’s in by what look like handcuffs but none he’s ever seen before: another SHIELD contraption then, one he probably won’t be able to break out of.

In the corner, Lidochka and the Captain – Scott – McCall – _fuck_ , he doesn’t even know what to call the man – are talking in soft voices. “He knew my name,” McCall is saying and his voice is shaky and tense.

“That might be all he knows,” Lidochka says, and when she glances over her shoulder, her lips are stretched in a thin, tight line. Stas blink at her carefully and she turns to face him. “He’s awake,” she says to McCall and he turns too.

Stas gets his first good look at the man who he thinks was once his best friend. There are dark circles under his eyes which are dull and dark. He looks exhausted, like a man teetering on the edge of exhaustion. He looks weak, and Stas wonders if maybe he’d be easier to kill like this.

Something in him recoils at the thought and he struggles against it, this presence pushing against him, even though he knows what it is.

It must show on his face because Lidochka takes a step forward, fists clenched, ready to attack. Stas tenses himself for the blow that is sure to come; she’s always been had one hell of a hitter. It surprises him when McCall slides a hand around her wrist and tugs until she backs off.

“Lydia,” he says softly and his voice is a warning, “Allison’s waiting for you.”

Stas feels his eyebrow twitch in surprise. “ _Lydia_?” he asks from the chair. “That’s a new one.”

Lidochka flinches at the sound of his voice, rusty and unused as it is, but she sweeps out the room with barely a backwards glance.

McCall doesn’t watch her go, just keeps his gaze steady on Stas. “How are you feeling, Stiles?” he asks.

Stas tries not flinch at that _word_ falling from his lips. “That’s not my name,” he says dully.

McCall sinks down into the opposite chair. “It was once,” he murmurs, scrubbing at his eyes.

“You don’t seem to understand, Captain,” Stas sneers, “I’m not your Stiles. I’m a weapon; nothing more, nothing less. Whatever you see in me is your own imagination.”

He knows it’s a lie even as he says it. He remembers Stiles, remembers Captain America before he was Captain America, and after and always.

“Don’t play games,” McCall says in something close to a snarl. “You said my name in the lab.”

“Did I?” Stas asks, putting a carefully blank expression on his face.

Something dark and desperate flits across McCall’s face but he tamps down on it quickly. “SHIELD is going to send someone in to talk to you,” he says coldly. “They expect you to cooperate.”

“And if I don’t?” Stas asks.

“I don’t know,” McCall says, but his gaze flits away, ashamed, and Stas knows exactly what will happen if he doesn’t.

He laughs then, more a sneer than anything. “Sure,” he says and watches the way McCall’s eyes fill with a cautious kind of hope that he feels a desperate urge to extinguish. “It’s not like I have anything better to do.”

-

 “What do you remember about the Red Room?” an agent asks him.

She’s wearing a black suit and a white shirt and a black tie. Stas tilts his head at her, wonders why everyone at SHIELD always looks like they’re going to a funeral.

“Nothing,” he says and the agent raises an eyebrow.

“Mister Stilinski,” she says in a bored tone, “Captain McCall assured us of your complete cooperation. I imagine he’d be very disappointed if you didn’t oblige.”

He rolls his eyes at her. “Nice try,” he says. “Save your patriotic bullshit for someone who cares.”

The agent looks slightly taken aback; he is supposed to be Captain America’s best friend after all. “If you don’t cooperate,” she says, voice low, “We’ll be forced to bring in a specialist.”

Stas leans back in the chair and laughs. “That’s the best you got?” he asks. Fuck her, fuck McCall, fuck all of them. “Do your worst,” he says and grins.

-

They never send in a specialist. What he gets instead is McCall, with his big blue eyes, who is both his caretaker and his keeper. He brings bowls of water and cleans the dirt from Stas’ face. He puts antiseptic on his wounds and wraps bandages around his wrists where the cuffs dig in. He feeds him mouthful by mouthful: dry sandwiches, warm soups, ice cold water.

Throughout it all, he talks. Stories from their shared childhood, from their days in Europe; stories Stas knows because he lived through them. He tries to keep those memories locked down, tries to keep his emotions in check.

It’s hard though, with all these things bubbling away under his skin. He can keep them tamped down while McCall’s there, but at night they make his brain burn, nightmares playing out across the back of his eyelids. Half a century worth of wars, of bloodstained hands, of blood-splattered clothes; and with them snow like static colouring every scene.

It makes the mornings hardest. He wakes shaky and sick, body uncooperative where he’s curled in his chair, covered in a sheen of cold sweat. He spends the first ten minutes trying not to throw up; the next ten trying to stop his head from spinning.

It’s one of these mornings when McCall comes in earlier than usual, while Stas is clenching his jaw to fight the taste of vomit in his mouth. “What is it?” he asks immediately,

Stas rears back in the chair. “Don’t,” he gets out, holding his hands up to ward him off.

“Are you remembering?” McCall asks, but Stas shakes his head. McCall settles into the other chair, leaning forward to peer at him earnestly. He must see the cracks showing, because his next question is: “Do you know me?”

Stas glances up at him, distracted by the nausea rolling through him. “Yes,” he says, then flinches back as he realises his mistake.

McCall presses his opening. “How do you know me?” he asks, and Stas schools his face into something carefully blank.

“You’re Captain America,” he tells him. “Everyone knows you.”

McCall opens his mouth and shuts it again a few times, like a fish, like he wants to say something. Eventually what comes out is: “What’s your name?”

Stas keeps his mouth shut. He doesn’t have an answer for him. His name is Stiles; his name is Sergeant Stilinski; his name is Stanislaw; his name is the Winter Soldier. Truth be told, he’s still a little confused on the details.

“Your name is Przemyslaw Stilinski,” McCall tells him. “I always called you Stiles.”

Stas is as surprised as McCall when he mutters: “I know,” and McCall takes a hesitant step forward.

“You remember,” he says, something optimistic flashing in his eyes.

“There’s nothing to remember,” Stas tells him, but McCall just shakes his head.

“If that’s what you want to believe,” he says softly, but his gaze is more hopeful than Stas has ever seen.

They move him to a new room after that. It’s still a dingy, dirty basement lit only by ugly bulbs, but this one has a cot and a sink and two chairs. The door still locks from the outside, but apparently they’ve decided he’s not going to attack anyone because there are no cuffs, no chains.

It’s here that McCall comes to see him again, with a new proposal. “SHIELD wants to try something,” he says, “To make you remember. Will you let them?”

Stas raises an eyebrow at him. “Do I have a choice?”

“You do,” McCall tells him; “But if you say no, they’re going to lock you up and throw away the key.”

Stas laughs harshly. “Interesting definition of _choice_ ,” he says, trying to stop his disgust from showing on his face.

“You have to do it,” McCall says, opening his hands imploringly.

“I don’t,” Stas points out. He’s sick of people poking around in his brain. He’s had an entire lifetime ripped from him by people who knew what they were doing. The prospect of SHIELD doing the same makes him sick to his stomach. “I really, _really_ don’t.”

In front of him, McCall’s face crumples. “Just say yes,” he pleads, eyes drilling into Stas.

Stas considers it: Captain America, practically on his knees, begging. He wonders how much it’s cost McCall already to make SHIELD give him a stay of execution for this long. Too much, probably; Stas knows how much organisations like this ask for.

He looks at McCall’s face, at the desperation painted there. He remembers a time when he would have done anything for this man, anything for that face, and something twists in his gut.  

“I’ll do it,” he says, and tries not to be affected by McCall’s ecstatic smile.

-

What they want to try is recalibration: cognitive realignment to put his memories of being Stiles back into his brain. There are straps and needles, and Stas struggles until his wrists are raw, screaming himself into unconsciousness over and over and over again.

McCall comes to see him after every trip to the lab. The first time he’s apologetic and hopeful, carefully cleans the puncture marks so they don’t get infected and sits with Stas until he falls asleep. The third time he’s still apologetic but less hopeful, making tea to soothe his throat and asking him how he feels. The sixth time he’s still apologetic but not hopeful at all, lurking in the doorway while Stas tends to his own wounds and puts himself to bed.

After the ninth time, McCall just sits down in the spare chair and frowns at him. “You have to make a choice,” he says angrily. “Either you’re the Winter Soldier or you’re Stiles Stilinski.”

Stas flinches. The doctors think that the recalibration isn’t working because he’s fighting the process. Of course McCall has figured out that it’s not working because the memories are already there.

“I can’t be what you want me to be,” Stas tells him. “I can’t be Stiles.”

McCall nods. “I know; I figured that out already. But that doesn’t mean you have to be the Winter Soldier either.”

Stas looks away from McCall’s heavy gaze, focuses on wiping the blood from his forehead. “That’s all I know how to be,” he says quietly.

McCall’s intake of breath is loud in the stillness of the room. When Stas looks up, he’s shaking his head angrily. “You have all those memories in your head,” he says, “You know there’s more to you than that.”

Stas opens his mouth to object but no words come out. McCall’s right after all. No surprises there; at this point McCall seems to know him better than he knows himself.

He goes back to cleaning his cuts, using the hot water McCall brought him to wash away the blood that crusts around his wrists. Across from him, McCall sighs and shifts in the chair. Stas just watches the water turning rusty red.

Eventually McCall pushes himself to his feet. “I can’t do this anymore,” he says softly; “I’m sorry.” And he begins to move towards the door.

It isn’t until he reaches for the handle that Stas finds his voice again. “I don’t know who I am,” he admits, and when he glances down his hands are shaking.

McCall pauses, turning to look at Stas over his shoulder with a look that is part hate, part hope. “Pretending that you don’t know who you were isn’t going to change that,” he says, and slams the door on his way out.

-

Lydia comes to see him. Stas remembers her, remembers loving her; but it all feels like a dream now, buried under nearly seventy years of brain washing and Stiles’ penchant for brunettes.

“Scott tells me you’re stalling,” she says as she sits on his cot.

Stas scoots back so she can stretch her legs out the way he knows she likes. “Nice to see you too,” he says.

The look she gives him is blank and calm, but he’s known her for nearly fifty years, he can read her expression by now. The too-slow blink of her eyes is fondness; the tiny twitch of her eyebrow is amusement.

“How much longer are you going to keep prevaricating?” she asks.

“ _Prevaricating_ ,” Stas repeats, rolling the sound around in his mouth. “That’s a nice word; who taught you that?”

This time Lydia actually rolls her eyes. “You did,” she tells him.

Stas tilts his head at her. “That’s interesting. I don’t remember that.”

Lydia doesn’t purse her lips but it’s a close thing. “Now you’re _really_ being evasive.” She pokes him with her toes. “He’s right, you know? You might have two people living in your head but only one can be in control.”  

Stas shakes his head. “I can’t just choose,” he tells her. “It’s not that easy.”

Lydia laughs, echoing and so familiar. “ _Obviously_ ,” she says and pokes at him again. “If it were easy you’d have done it already.”

He frowns at her. “Stop that,” he says, grabbing at her feet.

“ _You_ stop,” she says. He raises an eyebrow at her but she just stares blankly back. “I know why you’re avoiding it. It’s a difficult thing to do.”

“Since when were you so understanding?” Stas asks.

Lydia looks at him intently and then reaches across the space between them to hold his hand in a gesture that is so unlike her that he jerks back a little at her touch. Her mouth ticks upwards in the corners – oh, she thinks she’s being _funny_ – and he scowls at her.

“I said stop,” he demands, but even as he says it he knows how half-hearted it is. “It doesn’t work like that. I can’t just choose.”

Lydia raises one perfect eyebrow. “I never said you have to choose.”

And that catches his attention. “What are you saying then?” he asks, slowly letting go of her feet.  

Lydia smiles, a knowing smirk that slowly creeps across her features. His heart aches faintly at the sight of such a familiar, smug expression.  “I adapted,” she says, and pats his hand. “Maybe you need to do that.”

-

It’s a Wednesday when Stas finally decides that he’s done pretending.

When he wakes up, for the first time in a long time, his brain doesn’t feel like it’s on fire. He remembers everything: a fall into the snow and ice in a chamber; knives and Kevlar, rifles and the perfect shot; girls kissing his cheeks under the New York skyline and hands clasping his in the darkness of the Red Room corridors. He’s closer to whole than he ever has been.

McCall calls him Stiles and Stas is starting to like the name, the way it tastes in his mouth. It’s clean and pure; it doesn’t remind him of blood and death and years of horror. He’s still light years away from being the real Stiles, the one that McCall remembers him being, but he’s not the Winter Soldier either. That man is long gone, and it feels good to look at his hands and think of a time when they weren’t covered in blood.

An hour after he wakes, the door opens with a click, and McCall – no, _no_ , this is Scott – enters. He looks tired, dark bags under his eyes as the flit around the room, taking in the bare walls, the cot, the chairs, and his expression is bordering on hopeless. He looks like he’s given up.

“Hey,” he says quietly. “How are you?”

“Hi, Scott,” Stiles says, and tilts his head up to smile at the confused expression on Scott’s face. “I think I’m ready to talk now.”

**Author's Note:**

> Procrastination nation over here, exams drive me to ~~drink~~ write.


End file.
